The Open Beta for Echo Combat is finally here! If you have Oculus Home installed already, you may have noticed that the Echo games have undergone a bit of re-branding. Instead of Echo Combat and Echo Arena existing in the launch separately, there is now just Echo VR and when you load into the lobby you pick which game you want.

Echo Arena is the disc-based mixture of Quidditch and Soccer that we loved last year in our review, while Echo Combat is a zero-G shooter that blends Overwatch with Echo-style movement. It’s a ton of fun as well.

We’ll be livestreaming Echo Combat on PC using Rift with Touch starting very soon (which means we’ll start at approximately 2:20PM PT) and aim to last for about an hour or so. We’re going to use Restream to hit both YouTube and Twitch at the same time!

You can see our archived streams all in this one handy Livestream playlist over on the official UploadVR YouTube channel (which you should totally subscribe to by the way). We’re also rebooting our Twitch channel too.

Let us know which games you want us to livestream next and if you want to see more Echo Combat in the future. Comment with any feedback down below!

Live-action meets CGI in this six-part adaptation of Lottie Moggach’s hit YA novel. A suspenseful cyber-drama series developed by Bryan Elsley, Kiss Me First tells the story of Leila (Taboo’s Tallulah Haddon), a lonely 17-year-old haunted by the death of her mother. In order to escape the tortures of her reality, Leila has become addicted

The new “force sensors can be used in conjunction with capacitive sensors to enable higher fidelity interactions. With these two sensors working together, we can detect the full range of the hand position – from completely open, to holding the controller lightly, to gripping it tightly. This helps us understand user intent and makes things like ‘pickup and throw’ with Knuckles EV2 much improved.”

Here are some videos showing the new controllers in action:

As part of the roll-out, a new tech demo called Moondust set in the Portal universe will be available to “hundreds” of developers receiving the new controller prototypes.

Last week I wrote about an Assassin’s Creed VR experience I found at an Ubisoft event that was tucked away in a corner created by a company called Triotech. It was on display using one of their proprietary VRMaze booths, which combine wireless Vives, backpack PCs, and smart level mapping to simulate actually exploring a multi-level building. That same booth also had a “Virtual Rabbids” game as well.

Virtual Rabbids only used a single Vive controller so instead of shooting a bow and arrow like in Assassin’s Creed VR, I was shooting a laser gun. Everything else just involved me physically moving around, evading laser shots from the Rabbids, and ducking behind walls for cover.

Triotech’s VRMaze platform seems incredibly versatile. Using the same little square-shaped room with a cutout in the middle (shown in the video above and image down below) they can map out a variety of game experiences. Despite standing in the same real world spot, I didn’t feel like I was playing a game with a similar layout at all.

The Assassin’s Creed VR game was much more narrative, with big climactic moments, a giant boss fight, and even a leap of faith at the end. For Virtual Rabbids, it’s all about pure arcade fun. I’d walk into a room and have four or five Rabbids flying around or floating in the air, firing lasers at me. It only took a minute or two for me to trust the tracking system enough to duck around behind walls and not need to feel out things with my hands first.

For this setup they were only use two Vive sensors in the corners, like you would at home, with see-through walls at the center of the “maze” to allow the signals to pass through. However, if I leaned down too much or stood in the corner just right it’d still occlude the controllers and headset every now and then. Adding more sensors would have helped a lot.

Virtual Rabbids was a fun, simple little shooting gallery. Combining wireless VR with a small, discreet space like the VRMaze worked really well. Something like this wouldn’t look out of place at all to see at an arcade and the short play sessions are nice and manageable.

Triotech currently has over 300 locations around the world and you can see an interactive map of each right here. It’s unclear which of them feature the Rabbids and which feature the Minotaur maze, but an Assassin’s Creed VR experience is also coming soon.

Would you play a brief Rabbids VR experience like this at home? Let us know down in the comments below!

Madame Tussauds Hollywood is offering a new VR attraction next to the Walk of Fame and the Chinese Theatre.

The 4-player VR installation is from the Virtual Room and situated among the wax inhabitants of Hollywood Boulevard. The Virtual Room operates similar installations in Europe, as well as a second location in Hollywood.

The system inside Madame Tussauds uses up to four HTC Vives in separate pods. You can see the other players in VR and the microphones work well to foster communication. The future is dying due to some mishap with time travel and it is now up to your team to go back to various points in the past and change history. Each player has a room-scale space to walk around inside and tasks require players to work together. Destinations the team can visit include the moon for the 1969 Apollo landing, an ancient Egyptian area and a medieval dungeon.

We experienced a few bugs when I tried the experience with some friends. Before we started, one player’s height was set wrong so her feet were in the floor. The rest of us spent our first 10 minutes in a virtual waiting room as that was fixed. We also experienced a progression-halting bug during one of the experiences. A wooden rod we needed to move an object in the world simply didn’t appear for me. Any time you get stuck, a game operator watching outside VR can push the experience through to its next step.

It is possible that pricing can change, but initially tickets are around $12 per person to visit just one of the locations we tried for about 10 to 15 minutes. That adds up extremely fast, with a longer trip in VR to multiple destinations easily costing well over $100 if four people wanted to experience all of it. Madame Tussauds and Virtual Room are offering an interesting take on VR attractions and cooperative experiences, but more work needs to be done with their software design, however, so that people can trust that the reason they are stuck is they haven’t figured out a piece of the puzzle — not because the experience itself is broken.

Tickets are available on a walk up basis only at the time of this writing, but online tickets should be available soon.

I’ll be curious to see how this attraction performs in light of new launches like The VOID’s new $33 horror experience, or Dave & Buster’s 5-minute Jurassic World experience which costs only $5.